The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  Either way, the sudden unwanted echo of the recent past was enough to make Sabir pause in his flight and rethink his position. He edged back towards the summer house wall, hissing nervously through his teeth. He could clearly see the shadows of two men reflected off the ceiling of his study. Burglars? The heck with that. Burglars didn’t walk around their victim’s house switching on the electric lights. CIA? FBI? IRS? Who the hell else gave themselves the right to come visiting honest citizens in the middle of the night?

  With a sudden, intense conviction, Sabir knew exactly who the men were, what they were looking for, and why they were looking for it.

  It was at this point that he remembered his father’s old shotgun. Ever since his childhood it had been kept in the understairs wine cellar, hanging upside down by its trigger guard on a meat hook. Sabir hadn’t moved a thing in the house since his father’s death three years before – there had never seemed any point. So if the trigger guard hadn’t rusted away in the interim, the shotgun would presumably still be there.

  Sabir’s sudden focus on the shotgun and on the sanctity of his family home served to pull him together and renew his courage. If these men came from the Countess, as he suspected they did, he had no choice but to confront them. They were his problem and his problem alone. He was damned if he would scuttle off down Main Street in his pyjamas at three o’clock in the morning and go wake up his neighbours.

  Sabir had one ace up his sleeve, however. He knew from his time as a journalist on the New England Courier that Massachusetts had draconian burglary laws – armed burglary carried a minimum fifteen-year jail term, and even unarmed breaking and entering could fetch you five. And he was willing to bet that whoever the Countess had sent would have come armed.

  As he headed for the cellar he began to rehearse in his mind just how the thing might conceivably play out.

  6

  Vau straightened up from his perusal of Sabir’s study and turned towards his elder brother. ‘Sabir must keep everything locked away in his head. There’s nothing of any interest in here.’

  ‘Did you really think there would be?’

  Vau shrugged. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think anything. As far as I’m concerned, we just came here to revenge ourselves on Rocha’s killer.’

  ‘Ever the foot soldier, never the captain, right?’

  ‘You can laugh at me all you want, Abi. But I know where I stand in the general scheme of things. I’m grateful to Madame, our mother, and to Monsieur, our father, for adopting me. I’m grateful for the title I’ve inherited, and even more grateful for the money that goes with it. Cleverer people than me can work out strategies and interpret prophecies and delay the coming of Armageddon – or whatever the hell it is we’re meant to be doing. Me, I just obey orders.’

  Abi sprawled back against Sabir’s desk, his arms spread to support his weight. He looked his brother up and down, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that you’re a happy and contented man?’

  ‘Happy? Contented? I don’t know about that. But there’s one thing I do know.’ Vau hesitated briefly, as if gathering his thoughts together after a long hiatus. ‘I’m going to confess something to you, Abi. Something that you may not give a damn about. But I’m going to tell you nonetheless.’

  Abi cocked his head to one side encouragingly. He was clearly enjoying himself.

  Vau snorted in a lungful of air, as if he was readying himself for a hundred-metre free-dive. ‘You are the only person I truly care about in this world, Abi. The only one. And that’s not because you’re anything special – don’t ever think that. But because we’re viscerally linked. You’re my twin. We were even connected together, or so they tell me, when we were born. Plus you’re brighter than me, Abi, I give you that. And quicker. But you won’t ever find anyone else truer to you than me, if you were to search for a thousand years.’

  ‘The master of the nonsequitur strikes again.’ Abi mimicked being squashed up against a wall by an unwanted admirer. Then his face became more serious. ‘Why are you telling me this, Vau? And why here?’

  ‘Because I worry about you, Abi. I think you’re beginning to like all this too much. I think you’re really beginning to believe that you’re something special – something over and above the norm. That moral laws don’t apply to you any longer. You’re becoming like Rocha, in other words. You’re becoming a freak. I mean look at us. We’re standing here in a foreign country, in someone else’s house – a house that we’re on the verge of torching, for pity’s sake – lit up like fucking Christmas trees. And you seem to think it’s all fine. That there’s something normal about this.’

  Abi made a full circle on the spot – widdershins – his hands flapping in mock veneration like a cartoon guru. ‘But it is normal, Vau. Can’t you see the beauty of it?’

  ‘Beauty?’

  ‘Yes, beauty. Let me lay it out for you, pendejo. Let me read you a lesson from the Good News Bible.’ Abi mimicked flicking open the pages of a book. ‘Monsieur, our father’s, distant ancestors were given a holy gage by France’s greatest and most venerated king – a king the Vatican later turned into a saint by popular acclamation. This gage was to protect the French realm from the Devil. So far so simple, no? But the gage wasn’t designed to stop with the king’s death. No. It continues on to this day.’

  ‘According to who?’

  Abi sighed condescendingly. ‘According to you and me. The fact that the rest of society is out of step with us – that France is no longer a monarchy – that none of these atheistical idiots believe in the Devil any more – all that is entirely irrelevant.’ Abi was grinning. ‘It’s the others that are the freaks. The people who refuse to act. The walking fucking victims. The sorts of people who have never moved across into no-man’s-land and plundered somebody else’s herd.’ Abi pointed at his brother. ‘We’re the hunters, Vau – you and I. And they are our prey. We’ve been set free thanks to St Louis’s edict. That’s all the moral justification we’ll ever need. Now bust that chair up and stack it over here. We need to get a blaze going.’

  Sabir had heard enough. Ammo or no ammo, he wasn’t about to allow these maniacs to set fire to his father’s house.

  He had scrabbled in vain through the wine cellar for the remotest sign of a box of cartridges. The shotgun had been in place, though, just as he remembered it. If he wanted to save his family home from destruction, he would simply have to use the empty weapon as a deterrent. The two of them couldn’t exactly stare down the barrels and check to see if they were loaded, now, could they?

  He kicked open the study door and brought the shotgun up to bear. He had understood the men to be twins from their conversation, but he was still unprepared for the uncanny resemblance between the two of them. It was like staring into the shards of a shattered mirror.

  The one called Vau was already in the process of levering off the semi-circular back of his father’s favourite library chair.

  ‘Drop that chair. You’re not setting fire to anything.’ Sabir kept his back firmly against the door. He had privately decided that if either of the men made an aggressive move towards him, he would simply throw the shotgun at them, turn on his heels, and leg it as fast as possible out of the house.

  Both men froze in place. The one called Abi was the first to relax and acknowledge him.

  ‘I suppose you expect us to put our hands up? To go and stand over by the wall, like they do in the movies?’

  ‘I want you to lie down on the ground. Then I want you to unhitch your belts, and push your trousers down around your ankles.’

  ‘Christ, Vau. The guy’s gay.’

  ‘Just do it. From this range, I can cut you both in half without even needing to switch barrels.’ Adam Sabir raised the shotgun and aimed it directly at Abi’s head. It was becoming increasingly obvious which of the two was in charge.

  The twins dropped slowly to their knees. Making a show of their reluctance, they unbuckled their bel
ts, pushed their trousers down, and stretched out on the floor. ‘What are you going to do now, Sabir? Rape us?’

  ‘The cons at Cedar Junction can do that. In fifteen years’ time you’ll be able to write a book about your experiences. It’ll be a sure-fire bestseller. You can call it Shafted By The Penal System.’

  ‘You hear that, Vau? This guy’s got a sense of humour. I suppose this means you’re going to call in the cops?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Look. We only came here for information. We’re not even armed. If you give us what we want, we’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘At least tell us who warned you we were coming? Because somebody warned you. There’s no way you just happened to be out of your room and in possession of a shotgun the exact moment we came by.’

  Sabir hesitated. Now that the twins were safely down on the ground, he wasn’t sure how best to finagle himself out of the situation he found himself in. ‘Nobody warned me.’ He edged further into the room and sidestepped towards the telephone.

  ‘Bullshit. We saw you go to bed. We’ve been watching this place for the past twelve hours. Somebody warned you.’ Abi turned towards his brother. ‘Hey, Vau. I know who it was. It was that pig of an ex-policeman. The one who kidnapped Lamia. The one Madame, our mother, says tried to bug our meeting and failed. But how did he know we were coming over here?’

  Vau met his brother’s gaze. Then he looked away.

  ‘It was that bitch of a sister of ours, wasn’t it? I should have killed her when I had the chance.’ Abi got up off the floor. He pulled his trousers up and tightened his belt as though Sabir were no longer in the room. ‘Get up, Vau. I’ve got all the information I need. This bastard’s not going to shoot us in a month of Sundays. He hasn’t got the balls for it. And I’m not waiting patiently here with my trousers around my ankles while he summons up enough courage to call the cops.’

  ‘Don’t move another step, de Bale.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself, Sabir.’ Abi sidestepped towards the door. ‘You saved your house. Be satisfied with that. Shame, though. I enjoy a good blaze. But it’ll have to wait for another day. We’ll take a rain check on this one.’

  Sabir stood with the gun still trained on Abi. He couldn’t think what else to do.

  Vau went to join his brother at the door.

  ‘Look. Now you can get both of us again with just one barrel. But you’d have a hard time explaining it away, wouldn’t you? And you’d have an unpleasant bit of rearranging to do before the cops got here. That sort of thing takes a cooler head than yours.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘What do you think? The back door was open. You even let us in yourself. No sign of breaking and entering anywhere. And as you can see, we aren’t armed.’ Abi had slipped the fighting baton back inside his sleeve ten minutes before, after finding the bedroom empty. ‘No. What really happened was we travelled all the way out here to the United States just in order to forgive you for our brother’s death. To reach closure on it for our family. The Yanks love all that psycho stuff. But you turned crazy, like your mother, and threatened us with a shotgun. Just think how that would play out in a court of law – especially as it’s common knowledge that you were suspected of murder, and on the run from the French police, just five short months ago. Cops have long memories, Sabir. Shit sticks. And there’s no stink without shit.’

  Sabir snatched at the telephone. What else was there to do? Pull the trigger on an empty chamber? If there’d been any slugs in his shotgun he might have let them have it, if only for the crack about his mother. But as things stood, he could only watch them back out of the door while his finger tapped out three random numbers on the telephone keypad.

  As soon as the twins were downstairs and he heard the back door safely slam, Sabir pressed down on the receiver button, cancelling the call.

  He wouldn’t be calling any cops on this particular watch.

  7

  Sabir stood at his bedroom window and watched the twins get into their car, fire up the engine, and roar away from the kerbside with predictably screaming tyres.

  He turned around and tossed the useless shotgun onto his bed. Then he lay down beside it and closed his eyes. God, if he could only sleep. Instead he lay awake, the adrenalin rush triggered by the implicit violence of the last fifteen minutes slowly leaching out of his system.

  One thing he knew for certain. From now on his house would be as good as dead to him. That much was obvious even to an imbecile. Maintaining a fixed station like this, with Achor Bale’s twin brothers on his trail, would make him more than merely vulnerable. It would confirm him as suicidal.

  No. The only thing for it was to get on the road and keep moving, taking any information he needed with him in his head. Curiously, the thought of going on the run again didn’t worry Sabir overmuch. In his mind he was a thousand miles away from Stockbridge already.

  Much to his surprise, his investigation of the 52 lost Nostradamus quatrains had moved on by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, to the extent that he was becoming increasingly eager to test out his new theories in the field. Maybe, just maybe, he could squeeze a book’s worth of material out of the thing without giving anything crucial away.

  Sabir realized that only by publishing a rigorously expurgated version of the prophecies – with his own tentative suggestions as to their significance – could he protect both himself and the future of Alexi and Yola’s unborn child. He would, in effect, be conducting a damage limitation exercise in expedient disinformation.

  When Captain Joris Calque of France’s Police Nationale had visited him in hospital all those months ago, the man had not come bearing a punnet of grapes. He had come on a fishing expedition for reasons as to why the Countess’s eldest son, Achor Bale, had been pursuing Sabir and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, halfway across France with such a murderous and single-minded intensity.

  At first, Sabir had refused to enlighten him. Then Calque had reminded him of the sacrifices made by his late assistant, Paul Macron, and by the seriously injured Sergeant Spola in an effort to keep Sabir and his friends alive. Sabir had been forced to acknowledge that Calque had played fair by both him and by Yola and Alexi. At least according to his lights.

  Reluctantly, he had taken pity on the man. He had begun by explaining how he believed that Nostradamus’s 52 lost quatrains constituted a 52-year rundown towards the date of a possible Armageddon. And that in his opinion the 52-year cycle had begun in 1960, leading to a possible end date circa 2012. And that this end date corresponded as near as dammit to the Mayan Great Change, which was predicted, according to the Maya Long Count Calendar, to occur on 21 December of that same year.

  He had gone on to explain how each quatrain in the cycle appeared to point towards the events in just one specific run-up year. The list, in its entirety, covered the first French nuclear test in Algeria, the serial end of the French and British Empires, the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin’s trip into space, the Kennedy brothers’ assassinations, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Arab/Israeli Six Day War, the US Defeat in Vietnam, the Cambodian Genocide, the Mexico City earthquake, the First and Second Gulf Wars, the 9/11 Twin Towers Disaster, the New Orleans Floods and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

  According to Sabir’s theory of Nostradamus’s intentions, as each event unfolded just as the seer had predicted, the exact End date of the cycle would, in consequence, became ever more firmly fixed in people’s minds. This would then enable the world’s population to come to terms with what awaited them and – if at all possible – do something about it. This part of Nostradamus’s master plan had not worked out quite as the seer intended.

  Instead of being one amongst millions in on the secret, Sabir was now the only man on earth who knew that the prophecy earmarked for the present year purported to describe the location of a new visionary who would either confirm or deny the end date – a person c
apable, like Nostradamus, of seeing into the future and channelling the information found there. Only this person could tell the world what awaited it – regeneration or apocalypse.

  The final-but-one prophecy in the 52-year cycle went on to describe the birth and identity of the Second Coming and his symbolic role against the Antichrist. It described how the knowledge of the birth of the Second Coming would dilute the Antichrist’s power, and make him vulnerable. And how this knowledge would gather together both believers and non-believers in a tidal wave of righteousness combating the forces of evil.

  This information Sabir kept rigorously to himself. There clearly had to be a reason why Nostradamus had given his prophecies to the Gypsies for safekeeping, and that reason was that the Second Coming, ergo the Parousia, was due to be born of the direct line of the guardians of the prophecies.

  This child was now on the way, and Yola, Sabir’s blood sister, was to be its mother. She had conceived the child on the beach at Cargèse, in Corsica, after her notional – although entirely voluntary – kidnap by her long-time sweetheart, Alexi Dufontaine. Yola had confided to Sabir that she had conceived the child at the exact moment she lost her virginity, just as a flight of ducks had cast their shadow over the mating couple. Later, after Alexi had symbolically plucked out her eyes – Yola had used the Gypsy euphemism for female sexual ecstasy when describing the event – a male dog had run up to her on the beach and had licked her hand. This was how she knew their child would be a son.

  More than four centuries before, Nostradamus had given the Samana family the location and safekeeping of the prophecies precisely in order to protect them from the prophecies’ unintended consequences. The fact that the Parousia was to emerge from the most hated, reviled, and discriminated-against portion of the world population – people with no clear land of their own, and no clear identity beyond that which they carried with them – would form a necessary part of the supranational healing process. The Gypsies were a nomadic people, shunned and sidelined by virtually all established cultures. Always the optimist, Nostradamus must have reckoned that if the world were ever to accept a saviour from amongst such a company, it must first – almost by definition – have learned the virtues of tolerance and inclusiveness.